Chapter 254
Tärna's body on her stone stool, Mingus across her feet. Grip kneeling beside her in the Lace, the white running through her hair. Svala on her knees. Both crews crowding the stair. And far below on the black water, the Gilded Cage under sail, longboats swinging out, the Flock's children going down into them in carry-nets.
at the rail. Sad since the stage: bells tied, face still, rose marks grey. Looking down at the children. Then back at the dead woman on the stool. And her hand going to the ribbon.
untying it. tingeling. And beside a body that hasn't been dead five minutes, forcing a laugh up out of herself, cracked and ugly and loud:
whirling round on her knees, grief-wild.
(The rose bubbles drift into Svala's balloon, and bounce off it. Deep grief doesn't catch.)
The laugh carrying down the cliff and out over the water to the Gilded Cage. Rose bubbles drifting down onto the longboats. The Flock's children, half asleep in the carry-nets, waking laughing; the nets sagging, plink plink plink; children slipping out of them: onto the deck, into the sea. Flock fliers in glider-cloaks swooping down off the cliffs to catch them. Kompis, on the rim, one arm round his ribs, firing Bror down at the water, a wide gold shove cushioning a falling child into the arms of Roffe in the Upp Igen's longboat. Jeppson hauling two more over the gunwale with shaking hands.
The loyal net-captains with the carry-nets laughing too, helplessly, nets drooping out of their hands.
on the Cage's deck. He heard this laugh before. He saw the girl who made it go grey on a chalk stage so that he'd live. He's laughing, and while he's laughing he takes out his knife and cuts the last carry-net himself, and lowers the last child into a flier's arms.
A loyal net-captain swinging a Gaff at him. Nine putting him on the deck. And one by one, the House's young (nineteen-year-olds with forty-year-old faces) stepping across the deck to stand beside him. The Gilded Cage's helm swinging over. Her bow turning back from the dark, back toward the island, lanterns lowered.
at the rail, laughing and crying at the same time, until the very last child is caught. Then stopping. Tying the ribbon back round her bells. Sitting down on the stone.
staring at her. Then down at the water: the fliers with children in their arms, the longboats full. Understanding.
(Svala can't say sorry yet. She leans over and puts her forehead against Tihi's shoulder for one beat. That's all.)
Grip on the Wing-Keep beside her sister's body, holding the dead hand. In each panel, older. The black hair going grey, then white. The skin loosening. The hands spotting. The straight back bending. And in each panel, faces going past behind her eyes, one after another: a goat-island boy; a Flock girl; a baby with a 9 stitched on its blanket; a boy with a cowlick and tar on his fingers. Her lips moving with each one.
sitting down beside her in the dark without being asked, the hundred and eleven names on her arms glowing faintly emerald.
Grip: ninety-seven. White-haired, bent, small, holding her dead sister's hand. Two old women side by side on the Wing-Keep, the same face twice. Her pale grey eyes, and no rose rings in them any more.
She closes her eyes. Not a blink. Closed. And, sitting up beside her sister, for the first time in eighty years, she sleeps. On her knees, in its gilt cage, the rose book, its clasp open, unopened.
coming up the outside stair, young-old, a bruise on his cheek. Looking at his great-grandmother asleep. Then at the girl in the white scarf.
at the top of the stair, looking down at the Gilded Cage, where the House's young are waiting on her deck.
The last flight. Tärna wrapped in her moth-eaten grey glider-cloak, laid on the platform. The whole Flock on every roof and rail. The whistle-girl lifting the bone whistle to her lips: and her note cracks, in exactly the same place. Svala on the rail, crimson line lighting up her arm.
Across the top of the spread, ten thousand birds lifting Tärna's cloaked body off the Wing-Keep and carrying it up into the starless dark, higher and higher, a small grey shape at the heart of a storm of wings. And starting from the same rail, beside the rising bier, one dead-straight crimson-and-white streak running out and down across the whole spread, away from the island, far out over the black sea, Svala's line, and at the very end of it, exactly where she chose before she launched, on the water, holding course: the Marka. Drekk at the wheel, Ysel beside him, the whole crew on deck. And on the bow, tail going, a golden dog, waiting.
The line ending a foot above the Marka's deck, and Svala dropping onto the planks, rolling, sprawled, breathless, heart racing like a bird's. Mingus there before she stops rolling, licking her face. Vigolas standing over her.
flat on her back on the deck, looking up at a golden dog and a crew of faces, the way she looked up at them on the first morning.
sitting up, a quick wet grin, the chipped tooth.
The crew round her. Over her head, her plate, ticking.
SVALA · DRIFTING-5 · K-III TESTED · Scalelist #1,196
Overhead, Flyttfågeln flying away in its storm of birds, the whistle-girl's cracked whistle growing faint, a tiny old woman asleep on the Wing-Keep. Svala on the rail, one hand pressed flat against her chest. It aches, the farther the island goes. Rougeina beside her.
(A tiny panel: a cowlick, tar on small fingers, a jacket too big. Svala telling it. Rougeina listening to every word.)
alongside. In the rigging under the Perch, in her hammock, Tihi, bells tied silent with the ribbon, crying, quietly, the way she does when nobody needs her laugh for a while. Emma climbing up and sitting on the yard beside her. Not saying anything. Later:
on the Marka's rail across the gap, perfectly still, a beat late.
by lantern-light on the Upp Igen's rail: ~~ROPE, 1 NOTCH, DUE: A KNOT SLIPS~~ scored through with the pin. Below it: NET-KNOT · A BOOTLACE. FALL · A SPILLED DRINK. And MOUTH, 1 NOTCH. DUE: ?, the scratches of that line seeming, in the swinging lamplight, almost to throb. On his forearm, the emerald ledger-line has a kink in it that itches.
Drekk, Ysel beside him, the Landing Rope coiled at his feet. He ties the last knot in it, slow and careful.
(Behind them, Öde inking a new place between the barley-stalk names on her arm, in the darker ink: FLYTTFÅGELN · wherever it is tonight · a cracked whistle. And across the gap on the Upp Igen, Krydog sewing on a new patch, crooked: a square of grey Fowler net.)
An island in the starless dark. Seven hills. On each hill, a slender white tower, and on each tower a great lamp. Six of them burning steady and white. The seventh guttering low, like a candle at the end of its wick.
Round the foot of its tower, figures in smooth grey masks, holding glass jars up toward the lamp, lids open, and the lamp's light streaming down out of the air into them like mist into a funnel.
corking a jar full of warm white light and holding it up to admire.
On top of the sixth tower, very small against the dark, a child, a seven-year-old's shape with two braids hanging to her knees, holding a lumpy little clay lamp high over her head in both hands, its pure white flame throwing a perfect circle of light round her. Watching the seventh lamp go dim.